The emergency of the vamp and the production of a terrifying/terrified female sexuality in modern urban contexts

In the cinema of the first decades of the twentieth century the figure of the vamp emphasized the threats of a “pronounced” female sexuality to the maintenance of the bourgeois social order. Considering the analysis of A Fool There Was (Frank Powell, 1915) and the profound influence that Théda Bara’s character has had in the portrayal of female sexuality since its appearance, this communication aims to discuss the specificity of the emergency of the vamp figure and its relation to a developing imaginary of an urbanized woman, whose terrifying/terrified sexuality needed to be both produced and controlled.